FLAPJACKS: So how about that Game of Thrones preview?
ME: I saw it already.
FLAPJACKS: Yes, so how about it?
ME: It was fine.
FLAPJACKS: “It was fine.”
ME: Yep.
FLAPJACKS: Here we are, about to embark on the great nerd adventure of our generation –
ME: I think technically this isn’t our generation anymore.
FLAPJACKS: Maybe for you. I am filled with the power of youth.
ME: Ew.
FLAPJACKS: I am all about that Justin Bieber. His pop songs amuse and delight.
ME: Okay, now you’re just kind of sad.
FLAPJACKS: Anyway, here we are about to embark on this great nerd adventure and you’re playing it all cool? Come on, you aren’t fooling anybody. The arrows that they’re shooting have been individually fletched! That is attention to detail!
ME: True.
FLAPJACKS: Are you one of those people who can’t bring themselves to be enthusiastic because you think the books will never be finished?
ME: No, I think Martin will finish the books. He has additional incentive now.
FLAPJACKS: He didn’t before? It’s a crazy successful fantasy series.
ME: There is fantasy nerd money, and then there is HBO TV series money. Martin is now getting the second sort of money. It is a better sort of money that is never spent on anime-girl-boobs-mousepads. This sort of money does not know that steampunk is a thing. It thinks Wild Wild West is steampunk. It is well-bred money, and therefore infinitely superior. Once you have some of that money, you will do anything to keep getting it.
FLAPJACKS: So what you’re saying is that now he’s going to get a lot more money and really finish the books.
ME: Basically, yes. And if he dies early –
FLAPJACKS: Because he’s a fatty?
ME: I was going to skip over probable causes, myself.
FLAPJACKS: It’s not my fault the greatest fantasy writer of our time looks like a decrepit hobo.
ME: Be nice.
FLAPJACKS: Well, he does. I bet his train name is “Sidecar King George The Third.”
ME: Anyway, if he dies early, Hollywood will pay somebody a lot of money to finish the books from his notes. Probably Brandon Sanderson or Kevin Anderson or someone whose name rhymes with either of them. If you’re a fantasy writer looking to make it in the big leagues finishing other peoples’ work, you could do worse than to change your name to “Ganderson.”
FLAPJACKS: Yes, but what if he doesn’t finish the books in time for the series to get made on time?
ME: I’m not worried about that.
FLAPJACKS: But it took him six years and counting to write the fifth book. He’s got at best five years before the TV series catches up. Can he write two books in that time? How can you not be worried about that?
ME: Two reasons. Firstly, the TV series has smartly aged-up some of the kiddie characters, which was a good idea anyway because nobody really wants to see TV where people we would reasonably consider little kids are brutally assaulted or forced into arranged marriages.
FLAPJACKS: I’m sure there are fantasy nerds who would disagree and say that’s exactly what they want to see.
ME: Yes, but they are bad people. And second, I don’t think the TV series will last long enough to make it through to the end of the books, even if Martin gets them all finished on time.
FLAPJACKS: You don’t think it’s good? I watched the preview! The Others look like demon-zombies that you barely see! Sean Bean says “winter is coming” and it is absolutely perfect! Peter Dinklage is Tyrion and fulfills an entire internet’s worth of fantasy casting just by his very existence!
ME: No, I think it’s excellent. And I’ve seen the whole pilot already.
FLAPJACKS: How –
ME: TV critic.
FLAPJACKS: And you didn’t invite me over to watch them?
ME: Confidentiality agreement.
FLAPJACKS: You never care about those.
ME: I do with the HBO ones. HBO sends you a lot of awesome stuff if you’re a TV critic. I got to see the entirety of The Pacific six weeks before it aired. That was pretty sweet. I’m not messing up that deal.
FLAPJACKS: But if it’s so good why don’t you think it’ll last? Is this you being a cynic and believing nothing is good in human nature again?
ME: Not at all.
FLAPJACKS: So you believe now that people have generally good taste?
ME: Don’t be stupid. No, I think Game of Thrones will be popular. But I don’t think it’ll be popular enough. It has to justify its crazy high costs. Those individually fletched arrows don’t grow on trees, you know. They had to go out in the woods to find a crazy old man to fletch them some arrows, and then the crazy old man charged them six barrels of moonshine per arrow because he knew city folks when he saw them. And everything else costs money too: the CGI backdrops, the costuming, the armor, the stuntwork, all of it. We haven’t even seen a battle scene yet. Imagine how much money that’s going to cost!
FLAPJACKS: Maybe they could do everything with CGI sets like Star Wars.
ME: Listen to yourself.
FLAPJACKS: I retract my previous statement.
ME: Good. But here’s the truth: HBO will give this a lot of traction because it’s a prestige product that will draw eyeballs and get critics to jizz themselves. But that only goes so far: networks still gotta make dollars, and this show will need to be the next Sopranos or twice as better to break even.
FLAPJACKS: That’s depressing. Hey, can I borrow some peanut oil? I want to try a new stirfry recipe with my wok.
ME: …you mean my wok.
FLAPJACKS: I’m almost sure you’re wrong about that.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Also, read the article about SlutWalk, if only for the inevitable “look I’m not defending rapists, but you ladies really shouldn’t encourage those rapists” comments.

There’s a comic book project I’ve been wanting to write for a while now, and since a) there aren’t any spoilers involved, and b) I’ll probably never get to write it anyway, I thought I’d share it with everyone. It’s based on a fairly obscure, but interesting piece of comics trivia: In Uncanny X-Men #165, during the Brood saga, Kitty Pryde is described as 14 for the first time. Her birthday, we’re told, passed while she was in space. (So Lockheed? Officially the Coolest Birthday Present Ever.)

Then, in Excalibur #15, we see her celebrating her 15th birthday in the company of Saturnyne. (Who she thinks is Courtney Ross at the time. God, it’s hard explaining Chris Claremont comics.) These two comics were both written by the same author, so there’s no question of continuity mistakes or differences in authorial intent. The span of X-books from January 1983 to late July 1990 are fully intended to take place over roughly one 365-day span of time.

And since this occurred during one of the most crossover-rich periods in comics history, we have plenty of mutual data points to tie the other Marvel books into a cohesive timeline. “January 1983” doesn’t necessarily translate across every title to the exact same moment in Marvel Time, but we know that Secret Wars happened within that span. So Johnny and Alicia started their relationship during that year, Tony Stark lost his company and had his bout with alcoholism, the Hulk turned intelligent, and Spider-Man got his black costume.

Likewise, Secret Wars II happened in that year. Which places Xavier’s mugging and subsequent exile to space, the Hulk’s exile to the dimensional crossroads, Power Pack’s…um, almost their entire career, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves, Thor’s turning into a frog (in fact, the whole Simonson run was during that year), the founding of the West Coast Avengers, Tony Stark’s retaking his company from Stane and Stane’s subsequent suicide, the end of the Dire Wraith Wars, Cyclops’ marriage and leaving of the X-Men, the entire freaking existence of the Beyonder in the Marvel Universe, Kristoff’s becoming Doom and Doom’s war against Kristoff, the return of Jean Grey and the founding of X-Factor…deep breath…all in that year too.

Oh, and the Mutant Massacre hit in that year, and the Fall of the Mutants (which means that by extension, the Armor Wars saga, Captain America being defrocked and replaced by Super-Patriot, and then returning to the role as Super-Patriot became USAgent also all hit in that year…oh, and the deaths of the X-Men and their subsequent resurrection and relocation to Australia…) And Inferno hit in that year, so that meant that Johnny and Alicia’s marriage, the Thing becoming leader of the FF, Quicksilver’s descent into and return from mental illness, the entire career of the Hobgoblin, the first appearance of Venom, the death of Kraven the Hunter, Ms Marvel becoming the She-Thing, the Hulk’s career as a Vegas enforcer, the Thing’s career as a pro wrestler, the Masters of Evil’s assault on Avengers’ Mansion, the Avengers disbanding and subsequent reformation as a team consisting of Mr Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, Gilgamesh, Thor and Cap, the Avengers’ relocation to Hydrobase, Daredevil’s secret identity being discovered by the Kingpin, Storm losing and regaining her powers, the destruction of the X-Mansion, the temporary transformation of New York into a demonic netherworld…and although we can’t be sure, since Excalibur didn’t participate in that particular crossover, it also looks like Acts of Vengeance happened around then. So that adds the founding of the New Warriors, the destruction of Hydrobase…

Basically, it was a busy freaking year. 🙂 (You may feel free to contribute further momentous events in the comments section, but I think you get the idea.) The plan for the series I want to write borrows from DC’s “52”; only instead of telling a “missing” year of continuity in real time, this 52-issue weekly series would go back and retell that 365-day span of Marvel Time in real time. The reverse of decompression, it would try to convey to the readers the sheer chaos that exists in the Marvel Universe, and what it feels like to live in a world moving that fast. A year where snow fell in summer, where gods and more-than-gods walked the earth, a year where Iron Man quit and Captain America got fired, a year of destruction and creation and joy and sorrow…Marvel. One Year.

Anyone interested in reading that?

As good as Moon was – and Moon was goddamn excellent – Source Code makes it look like a noob director’s first uncertain work, assuming you can get past the scientific handwaving necessary to make the plot work.

Over at Torontoist, I take a strong stance in favour of naming rights.

I have always loved the Rocket Reds, and the reason is simple: they are the Barry Horowitz of the DC Universe.

Barry Horowitz, for those not in the know, was a professional wrestler and probably the last truly great jobber – the designated loser, the one who showed up to get his ass kicked by the up-and-coming star or the veteran needing the easy win to re-establish himself. He jobbed out for twenty years in the WWF before it became the WWE, and he was a master at not only making his opponents look good at kicking his ass, but at getting the crowd to love it when they kicked his ass. Barry Horowitz with his trademark self-pat-on-the-back, always entirely undeserved and always pointedly obnoxious, who always got pinned. Of course, over time the crowds came to love Horowitz, because you had to recognize skill when you see it, which eventually led to the “HOROWITZ WINS!” angle, wherein he finally managed a win and the crowd went nuts.

Which brings me back to the Rocket Reds. It’s worth remembering that the Rocket Reds were, for the most part, not a very pleasant bunch when they first arrived: Rocket Red #7 – the “classic” Rocket Red we all remember from the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League – was an exception to the rule. Most of the Rocket Reds were portrayed as clueless peons of an oppressive regime. And so they remained… until they weren’t that any more, because dammit, there is something likeable about the Rocket Reds. The Rocket Reds somehow have become something like the Russian ideal of a superhero – soldiers rather than vigilantes, sense of duty to the state, predilection for getting their ass kicked but in a stoic, we’ll-wear-you-down-eventually sort of way. In the Villains United special during Infinite Crisis, which was really the high point of the whole misguided exercise, Gail Simone has former Rocket Reds busting into their old armory to suit up in Rocket Red armor to go fight the army of villains, all the while chatting calmly about how this will most likely get them killed, and the humour of the scene just feels very grimly Russian in a way that’s very essential.

Nowadays the Rocket Reds are more or less a required element whenever one does a DC comic that might involve Russia. It’s almost impossible for there not to be Rocket Reds – it would be like going to Gorilla City and not having sentient gorillas. (If and when Batman ever goes to hire the Batman of Moscow, that Russian Batman should be a former Rocket Red.) Because the Rocket Reds might be the guys who get their asses kicked so the real heroes can look good – but they’ve got such a great way of getting their asses kicked that you can’t but help rooting for them.

So, you may have heard that Canada has an upcoming election! Or not. It’s entirely possible you didn’t hear about it at all. It’s understandable, what with Japan and Libya and Rebecca Black and all.1 Anyway, a lot of people have asked me to explain this election to them, as I am the only Canadian they know who’s willing to talk about our country’s politics rather than just rattle off a string of obscenities, which is the de facto Canadian answer to most political enquiries. So here we go!

So why are you having an election, anyway?

Traditionally, Canada has an election when one of two things happen: either the current government says “okay, time for an election,” and we go ask the Queen if we can have an election2, or the current government loses a vote of confidence, which is when the Members of Parliament all vote and say “this government sucks, we want a new one” and then we have to go ask the Queen if we can have an election. In Canada, most confidence votes are the annual budget vote, but in this case what happened was that a Parliamentary government committee found the government to be in contempt of Parliament for withholding crucial information3 about the costs of various bills and purchases it wished to pass, including a crime bill and the cost of some new fighter jets.

So this means that the current government will be turfed out?

Probably not.

Wait, what?

It’s like this. Canada is basically a four-party system.4 The Bloc Quebecois make it near-impossible for any party to get a majority since the Bloc will usually get around fifty of Quebec’s seventy-five seats, which means any other party, to get a majority, has to win 155 of the remaining 258 seats. That’s a pretty big benchmark to beat. Secondly, the NDP, our socialist-pinko party, at any time has about 20-36 of the remaining seats. The NDP will never be the head of a government; much like the Liberal Democrats in the UK, their ultimate goal is to reform the electoral system so that they get twenty percent of the seats to match the twenty percent of the vote they usually get.

So basically your options for actually running the country are the Conservatives or the Liberals.5 The Liberals got turfed out after a scandal in 2006 involving the misdirection of government advertising funds, and the Tories have been in power ever since, mostly because there’s one party competing for right-wing votes and three competing for left-wing votes, and basically the Tories haven’t done anything really amazingly offensive to alienate centrist voters yet because Canadians really don’t expect anything at all out of their government any more, and it would take a screwup of massive proportions for the Tories to really shock the centre out of… “complacency” isn’t quite the right word. Let’s go with “despair.” So far, the Tories have managed to weather proroguing the government, cabinet ministers doctoring reports, a whole lot of ethnic and racial slurs from backbenchers, numerous unpopular spending cuts, misuse of government funds for political purposes and a bunch of other things.

Wait, if they’re so bad, why don’t people vote Liberal instead?

Well, here’s the thing. For Liberal Party leaders, after Jean Chretien retired,6 we went from “capable right-hand man who’s not very inspiring” in Paul Martin to “intelligent man but boy he talks funny” in Stephane Dion, and got clobbered both times at the polls. Then, for some reason, the Liberal Party decided to shoot itself in the head and put Michael Ignatieff in charge, because what the party really needed was a soulless husk of a man leading it, I guess. Ignatieff has spent the last couple of years mostly knuckling under to any challenge Stephen Harper has put forth, mostly because Michael Ignatieff is a useless limpdick, but also because Ignatieff is firmly on the centre-right side of the Liberal Party and doesn’t really have economic views that are wildly dissimilar from some Tories when you get down to it. People might not like Harper, but generally it looks like we were all willing to wait for Ignatieff to go away. Unfortunately, he has not done this.

Then how come Ignatieff didn’t knuckle under this time?

There are three theories regarding this.

1.) Michael Ignatieff felt the contempt hearing was just too great a disregard of Canada’s political tradition and its public to let slide. This is probably the least likely option.

2.) Michael Ignatieff has been playing political rope-a-dope, or so he thinks, and will attack the Tories with every single scandal since 2006 and make them look really really bad. This is quite possible. I’m not sure how Ignatieff is going to get traction with stuff he couldn’t be bothered to use the first time around,7 but then again I never went to Harvard.

3.) Michael Ignatieff has realized he is a useless limpdick and wants to bow out of the Liberal Party gracefully so he can go back to college and be revered again, and can do so by getting his ass kicked in an election. This is also quite possible.

So the Tories are going to win?

Probably a minority government, yes.

Wait, don’t they already have that?

Yes.

So they’ll be happy with that?

Oh, heavens no. See, this is the third election where the social conservatives who represent the bulk of the modern Tory party have put up with what they consider a relative moderate as their leader. Never mind that Stephen Harper is easily the most right-wing prime minister in Canadian history: the fact that he represents himself as moderate offends them. But they’ve put up with it because they’ve been told that Harper represents their only chance at a majority government, and then they can pass anti-same-sex-marriage bills and anti-union bills and anti-whatever-they-don’t-like-this-week bills once they’ve got their majority.

But they’re only willing to let Harper have so many kicks at the can, and the grumbling within the party is getting more and more pronounced. For a long time there was a sort of belief that another moderate, like Jim Prentice or Peter MacKay, would take over when Harper left, but the socons have been quite clear that more moderate than Harper is a no-go, which is probably why Jim Prentice recently announced his retirement from politics to go run a bank.8 The socons want one of their own running the party, a Jason Kenney or the like. And if they don’t get their majority this time around, it’s entirely possible they’ll decide to go for it.

So this is essentially a “which leader would you like to stick around” contest for Ignatieff and Harper?

Probably Jack Layton as well.

Why? Is he unpopular too?

Actually Layton’s quite popular, but he’s been fighting prostate cancer for about a year. If the NDP don’t win – and they won’t – Layton will probably have to step down at some point to concentrate on his health. He will never admit this, because Jack Layton is the political equivalent of a bull terrier, but it’s true. For the NDP, this election probably has quite a bit to do with elevating the bench players so that Layton can step down and not leave the party rudderless.

So to sum up: this election won’t change anything except political organization of the various parties?

Not unless something crazy happens, but then again, part of politics is that you never know when something crazy will happen.

1. Yes, I think it’s entirely fair to describe Rebecca Black as more interesting than Canadian politics to the world at large. [↩]
2. Really. [↩]
3. Or, if you like, lying. [↩]
4. Yes, we have the Green Party too, but they don’t count and everybody knows it. [↩]
5. The Liberals, despite their name, are centrist. [↩]
6. It is worth explaining that Jean Chretien embodied one of the central principles of Canadian politics, which is that for all that the world thinks of us as nice and polite, we inevitably vote for whichever political leader seems like the most capable bastard. Chretien was a ridiculously capable bastard. [↩]
7. “But this time he’s GONE TOO FAR” is not really a great political rallying cry. [↩]
8. Well, that and the money. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

I genuinely have every confidence that Zack Snyder will eventually make a classic for the ages – his technical skill is steadily improving with the addition of actual craft, and he’s learning to work with actors greatly – but lord, this ain’t it.

Arguably, the measure by which any body that recognizes talent can be judged is to look at their track record over the years. Anyone can hand out an award (although it takes a very special type of person to get someone to hand one out to Pia Zadora…) but awards cannot dictate the judgment of history. Classic movies might not win awards, but they remain classics; some movies might be lauded with Oscar upon Oscar at the time, but wind up forgotten a decade later. And while a quick glance at the Oscars over the years has shown that they generally have a pretty good set of standards as compared to the taste of audiences over the decades (especially considering how hard it is to compare good movies–how exactly does one decide whether Jaws is better than One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?) But there have been a few notable missteps. Here, presented chronologically, are a few examples (as judged by me, a viewer) of times when the Oscars got it wrong.

1) 1941. Of course, 1941 should have won Best Picture easily. It had Christopher Lee and John Belushi in front of the cameras, and Steven Spielberg directing it. But audiences…hang on. Wait. Sorry. Wrong 1941. I’m actually talking about the year 1941, when the John Ford film How Green Was My Valley won Best Picture. In any other year, this wouldn’t have been a bad choice; John Ford is a legendary Hollywood director, and the film is a classic by most standards. But unfortunately for the Academy, it was up against Citizen Kane, the movie now widely considered to be the best picture not just of 1941, but ever. (“Widely”, of course, not “universally”. I, for one, will always wonder how Hellzapoppin’ didn’t even get nominated.) In all probability, the campaign waged by William Randolph Hearst against the film, which hurt it critically and financially, also damaged its chances of getting an Oscar.

2) 1952. Has anyone ever heard of The Greatest Show On Earth? Students of bad cinema, perhaps; it’s widely considered to be the worst movie ever to win Best Picture. And it’s not like it didn’t have solid competition, either; sometimes it can happen that Hollywood has a weak year overall, and films that wouldn’t make the cut wind up getting an Oscar (**cough** Gladiator **cough**), but this schmaltzy story about the Ringling Brothers Circus was up against classics like High Noon, The Quiet Man, and even films that didn’t get a nomination like Singing in the Rain. Cecil B. DeMille must have been passed over a few too many times in previous years, necessitating a “make-up” Oscar;  there’s really no other explanation as to why this undeserving candidate won.

3) 1956. Okay, look. I’m not going to suggest that Around the World in 80 Days was a terrible movie. It’s a fun popcorn flick, a blockbuster movie from an era before Hollywood really made blockbuster movies. But in a year when we saw The Court Jester, High Society, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Hollywood has never respected horror as a genre), Lust for Life, and The Searchers…the thought that none of those was even nominated, while Around the World… won, it doesn’t really sit well. (To say nothing of the films that were nominated but didn’t win. The King and I? The Ten Commandments? It’s a hard case to make that Phineas Fogg has stood the test of time better than those two.)

4) 1998. This was, of course, the year that the Academy took a lot of flack for the way it had allowed certain studios to lobby for their pictures. An Oscar had come to mean a lot of extra money for films still in the theaters and those just coming to DVD, and Miramax had gotten good at exploiting that; they released a “prestige” picture in late December, usually in a few markets to build word-of-mouth and make it eligible for an Oscar, then pushed hard for it with the Academy and rolled it out nationwide right around the time the nominations were announced. Then when it got an Oscar, they’d put it out on DVD with the words “Best Picture Winner” on the packaging, and an otherwise undistinguished romantic comedy like Shakespeare In Love suddenly became a major seller with only a modest financial outlay. But when it beat out such obviously superior candidates like Saving Private Ryan, the Academy found themselves with a bit of egg on their faces. They’ve since been a lot more guarded about letting the studios lobby for their pet films.

5) 2008. This is the one that inspired this column, actually; I imagine some film student, a hundred years from now, watching WALL-E for the twentieth or thirtieth time, marveling as always at the brilliantly daring choice to open up the film with only a single character on a dead world. They take notes on the way Pixar uses subtle shifts of movement to give astonishing amounts of personality to EVE and WALL-E, the way that their romance develops almost wordlessly, the way that WALL-E’s presence on the ship creates all sorts of tiny knock-on effects with huge consequences. They study the classic physical comedy, the attention to detail, and once again find themselves lost in the magnificence of a ground-breaking and timeless classic. Then, once again, they try to remember the film that beat it out for Best Picture. And once again, they break down and look it up because it just doesn’t stick in their minds. “Oh, that’s right,” they say, when they finally check Future Wikipedia. “WALL-E only won Best Animated Picture. It wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture that year. Something called Slumdog Millionaire won.” Then they shrug. “Never heard of it,” they say, before going back to watch WALL-E again.

I mentioned on Twitter recently1 that I liked FF #1, the newest iteration of Jonathan Hickman’s run on Fantastic Four, a hell of a lot. Other comic reviews were busy orgasming over the new issue of Batman Inc., which in fairness is quite good.2 But for me, FF was far and away the best comic of the week3, and then someone emailed and asked me why, and it’s been a long time since I did a proper comics review, so why not?

If I had to boil down FF‘s skill in a pragmatic manner, finding the one key element that I think makes it really work as a comic, it’s that Jonathan Hickman and Steve Epting have together done what the best ongoing superhero comics do: provide change which is mostly illusory but nonetheless existent. That’s the magic level of change you want in a great superhero comic: you can make all the huge sweeping changes you like to a character’s raison d’etre, his supporting cast, his costume, you can make him become The Amazing Rutabaga-Man for six months, but in the end these properties have amazing inertia. For example: if you give a character a Stunning New Costume, at best in fifteen years or so it will become a fondly-remembered artifact4; at worst it will become a source of bad comedy.5 I expect the new costumes in FF #1 will fall into the former category; they’re different enough that they’re honestly interesting, and they look good. But we all know that in a few years time we’ll be back to the blue costumes with big 4s on them, and that doesn’t really bother anybody.

Similarly, we know that in time, Johnny Storm will be revealed to not be dead. Hickman can protest as much as he likes that Johnny Storm is dead, but we all know he’s full of crap even if his intentions are honest (and really, given that he had Johnny die conspicuously off-panel, I don’t believe him for a second). But for the moment Johnny’s dead, and what’s important – and what Hickman and Epting do, note-perfect – is enforce the reality that this would traumatize the fuck out of the remaining members of the Fantastic Four. Again, this is not a new idea for writers of the book to explore; Mark Waid and Mike Weiringo did it when they killed off Ben temporarily during their run and there’s been one or two other times where other writers played with the idea as well. But Hickman and Epting’s work in showing how absolutely devastated the FF are is heartbreaking and lovely. Epting’s work on Ben in mourning – and Ben is always the most visually expressive of the FF – are some of my favorite panels he’s done ever.

Equally lovely is the fact that Spider-Man is the temporary replacement for Johnny, which is again perfect. This is not to knock all the other writers who have had Black Panther or She-Hulk or Ant-Man or Crystal or whoever be the “temporary fourth member of the Fantastic Four” – most of the alternates that have come through at one time or another have made story sense and been entirely decent.6 But Fantastic Four is a comic book about a family more than anything else, and over the past decade Spidey steadily became part of their extended family. It just feels like how, when a family suffers a major loss, your uncle maybe moves in for a while to make sure the place doesn’t fall apart. It feels essentially proper in a way that many other alternate members haven’t, and serves to reinforce the sense of loss that the FF have undergone (and Hickman and Epting use that as well). Really, Peter makes more sense as a member of the FF than he ever has as an Avenger.

(It’s worth noting, incidentally, that all of what I’ve mentioned so far is Hickman doing something he’s not really noted for: he’s writing small-ball here rather than playing with the crazy big ideas he built his rep on, and he’s killing it.)

And while Hickman and Epting give the introduction of the new FF – the “Future Foundation,” complete with the array of weirdly brilliant kids they brought in halfway through their run of Fantastic Four – all the due time they need, they also don’t forget to introduce their chosen antagonist. They’ve gone, it seems, with the Wizard, who is an interesting choice precisely because if you’re going to pick an F4 adversary who’s been in need of some stature-building for a long time, I’m pretty sure you have to pick the Wizard. I think every single major run on F4 over the last ten or fifteen years has used the Wizard alongside the Frightful Four at one point or another, and every single time the Wizard is revealed to be a dorky second-rater in a dorky purple helmet. Hickman and Epting, though, in the course of a few panels, make him genuinely intimidating, which is not a word I have associated with the Wizard in approximately ever, and it’s just good to see.

So you have your illusory change: Johnny’s dead! New costumes! Not even calling themselves “the Fantastic Four” any more! And that’s all exciting, but in five years or less it will be memories. But you also have your persistent change: exploration of the family’s trauma, deepening of Spidey’s relationship with them, what looks like an emphatic effort to finally put the Wizard into top-tier villain status. Those two elements, combined, make for what ongoing superhero comics can and should be. That’s why this is a good comic.

1. I know, I know… [↩]
2. It’s certainly more accessible than at least half of the Batman comics written by Grant Morrison, for a start. [↩]
3. Disclaimer: I have not read the new Xombi yet. That might well beat it, if it is anything as good as the first Xombi series was. [↩]
4. Say, for example, Dr. Strange’s Trenchcoat of Levitation period, or the time when he was wearing a mask. [↩]
5. Say, for example, the Mike Grell-era skin-bearing costume for Cosmic Boy. [↩]
6. Well, maybe not Ant-Man. [↩]

Toby S.: What do you think the odds are that the shenanigans unfolding in Wisconsin will have any lasting effect on US internal politics?

About even, I think. It’s still too soon to tell whether the uprising that’s begun in the midwest over anti-union shenanigans is going to have staying power. If it does, you’ll see lasting effect. If it doesn’t, you’ve seen the last gasp of the labour movement until they need to start really rioting again, which should probably come when corporations reintroduce company towns or similar abusive practices – give it twenty or thirty years and it’ll happen.

Menamebephil: What do you think of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’? Do you see it as a workable scheme?

No, not really. I see it as a clever marketing attempt to sell social service cuts. Now, elements of the Big Society idea are workable in certain areas: youth centres, for example, could probably be run primarily on a volunteer basis (if they weren’t already, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that that was the case). You’d need some paid staff, but volunteers could pad out the ranks and make the centers more cost-efficient. But the fact that occasionally there are areas where volunteerism can make for more efficient operation of social services doesn’t make it a universal plan.

Moreover, the fact that a lot of this volunteerism will almost certainly be church- and religious charity-driven makes little economic sense if you think about it, because rather than giving churches a tax break and then asking them to organize social services, you could instead just tax them and pay for it yourself, which would almost certainly be more efficient, but I doubt the Tories are interested in that sort of efficiency.

anthony: a) what will it take to have the green party to elect a member
b) how do you think the regional loggerhead will solve itself
c) how do we prioritize cities in the current canadian political context
d) what will it take to get ignatieff into the pmo

A) The other parties spontaneously dissolving.
B) Massive malfeasance on the part of a given political party that inspires populist outrage nationwide.
C) I have no idea. If anybody else does, let me know.
D) This assumes we want Ignatieff as Prime Minister, you realize. Honestly, I’d almost rather see Gilles Duceppe in there.

Silent g: What are your thoughts on Mayor Flounder 100+ days in?

In a shocking twist, he has turned out to be a stupid joke of a man whose smarter brother is really running the show and everybody knows it. I know: you’re totally surprised!

Magic Love Hose: If you had to recommend one single book on how Canada first implemented its single-payer health care system, which would you recommend?

There isn’t really a definitive history book on the topic, to be honest, mostly because it’s pretty straightforward. The Wikipedia entry gives you most of the basics you need to know.